I’ve spent a lot of time puzzling over one tricky question: what exactly is a whale’s skin?
I’ve argued about this with seasoned whalers out at sea and professional naturalists on land. I still stand by my original thought, even if it’s just a theory with no absolute proof.
So let’s break it down. What is a whale’s skin, and where exactly is it located?
You already know what whale blubber is. It’s firm, dense flesh, similar to lean beef but tougher, stretchier, and more compact. It usually sits eight to fifteen inches thick all over a whale’s body.
At first glance, it sounds ridiculous to call something that thick and dense “skin.” But think about it.
The blubber is the whale’s only thick, outer protective layer. There’s no other solid layer covering its body. And any animal’s outermost solid layer is, by definition, its skin.
Sure, if you touch a fresh, undamaged dead whale, you can scrape off an ultra-thin, clear film with your hand. It looks like the thinnest sheet of fish glue, but soft and smooth like satin—at least before it dries out.
Once this thin film dries, it shrinks, thickens a little, and turns stiff and brittle. I’ve kept a few dried pieces of it to use as bookmarks in my whale research books.
It’s completely transparent. Laid over printed text, it almost acts like a magnifying glass. There’s something oddly nice about reading whale facts through a piece of the whale itself.
But here’s the key point.
This delicate, see-through film covers the whale’s entire body, but it’s not truly the whale’s skin. It’s more like the skin of the actual skin. It’s absurd to think a massive whale has skin thinner and softer than a newborn baby’s. The thick blubber is the real skin.
Let’s put its size into perspective.
A large sperm whale’s blubber alone can produce a hundred barrels of oil. And that oil only makes up three-quarters of the blubber’s total weight. The rest is solid tissue.
Do the math: ten barrels equal one ton. Just three-quarters of the whale’s outer skin layer weighs ten full tons. It’s hard to fathom how enormous the whole creature truly is.
A living sperm whale’s surface is one of the ocean’s greatest wonders.
Its body is covered in countless fine, straight lines crisscrossing at angles, just like the delicate strokes of premium Italian line engravings.
These marks aren’t on that thin, clear surface film I mentioned earlier. They sit beneath it, etched directly into the whale’s actual body, visible through the transparent outer layer.
There’s more to these markings.
If you look closely enough, these linear patterns form strange, complex symbols. They’re just like hieroglyphs—the mysterious unreadable carvings on ancient Egyptian pyramid walls.
I once saw an illustration of old Native American carvings on stone palisades along the Upper Mississippi River, and it instantly reminded me of these whale markings. Just like those ancient stone carvings, the symbols on a sperm whale’s body have never been decoded.
The whale’s skin holds other strange features too.
Many sperm whales, especially full-grown males, have messy, random scratches across their backs and sides. These rough scars break up the neat, engraved line pattern covering their bodies.
It reminds me of the New England coastal rocks. A scientist once claimed those rocks are scarred from scraping against massive drifting icebergs. A sperm whale’s scarred skin looks exactly the same.
I believe these scratches come from fights with other whales. I’ve always noticed the biggest, strongest male whales have the most of these battle marks.
Let’s circle back to whale blubber.
As I said before, we strip it off the whale in long, wide sheets we call “blanket-pieces.” It’s a perfect name for it.
The blubber wraps entirely around the whale’s body, just like a thick blanket or a Native American poncho pulled over its head and draped all the way down its frame.
This thick, cozy layer is what lets whales survive in any ocean, in any weather, no matter how harsh the tides or temperatures.
Think about the frigid Arctic seas. How would Greenland whales survive those freezing waters without their blubber coat?
Other fish thrive in icy polar waters, but they’re cold-blooded creatures with no lungs. Their bodies basically run cold, sheltering themselves beside icebergs like travelers huddling around a winter campfire.
Whales are nothing like that. They have lungs and warm blood, just like humans. Freeze their blood, and they die instantly.
It’s astonishing, once you stop to think about it. These giant creatures need body warmth just as badly as we do, yet they spend their entire lives submerged in freezing Arctic waters.
Sailors who fall overboard there sometimes freeze solid in the ice for months, trapped like flies stuck in amber.
Even more incredible: tests have proven a polar whale’s blood is warmer than a human’s blood during summer in tropical Borneo.
This teaches us a remarkable lesson about life.
Whales have incredible vitality, thick protective barriers, and ample inner space to sustain their warmth.
Humans should look to the whale as a model.
We too should stay warm and steady amid life’s cold hardships. We too should live in this world without being consumed by it.
Stay calm in life’s hottest, most chaotic moments. Keep your spirit unyielding in life’s coldest, darkest trials.
Like the grand dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, like the mighty whale—hold fast to your own steady temperature, no matter the season or circumstance.
Yet these beautiful truths are so easy to say, and so impossible to truly teach.
How few things in the world stand as grand and unshakable as that domed cathedral? How few creatures rival the greatness of the whale?